10. THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, Andrew Dominik (2007). Just today, the Chicago Tribune listed this film as one of those from the past decade that was unjustly overlooked. He mentioned that it took "Blade Runner" about a decade to go from box office disappointment to genre stadard-bearer. I think the same can - and should- happen with this film. The 2000s saw an exciting upturn in the production of Westerns, albeit often very unconvential hybrids like "Brokeback Mountain" and "No Country For Old Men," the film that pulled focus away from this film in 2007. And while Javier Bardem was haunting in that film, there might not be a more revelatory performance this decade from someone you'd least expect than Casey Affleck's work here as a hero-worshiping Robert Ford. Brad Pitt is perfectly cast as Jesse James, and the entire cast does lovely work here. Roger Deakins, who never gets the credit he deserves, might have done his best cinematography on this film. It's Terence Malick-like in beauty. This slow-paced Western allows for deep psychological penetration. I can't speak highly enough about it. If you missed it, do yourself a favor and see it.
9. CHILDREN OF MEN, Alfonso Cuaron (2006). So many things are terrifying about Cuaron's masterful apocolyptic thriller. The film begins by telling us that the world's youngest citizen has died at the age of 18 and, in the year 2027 (not that far from now), no child has been born in 18 years. The human race faces extinction and London, where the film is set, is being bombed and terrorized. Sounds like Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Brave New World, but what stunned me about this film was its sense of hope. Clive Owen is fantastic as a disillusioned man who must take it upon himself to protect a miracle: a woman he discovers who is pregnant. The Christian symbolism is obvious and gives a rich depth to this movie without beating viewers over the head with it. And the Orwellian landscape is highlighted in the film's best - and now quite famous - sequence: a frightening, kinetic car chase sequence handled deftly by Cuaron with one continuous camera take. It's mind-blowing direction for any film junkie, and a movie that truly put a director up to the next level. I am deeply affected by "Children of Men" each time I see it, and my jaw continues to drop even when I know what's coming. Profound, haunting and significant filmmaking.
8. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Le Scafandre et le Papillon), Julian Schnabel (2007). The concept of this movie probably doesn't sound interesting...the main character cannot speak. He can't even move. He's in a bed. And the film's in French. Even I worried that this would be a boring obligation as I set out that year to watch award-nominated films as I do every holiday season. So imagine my surprise when this film turned out to be one of the most profound, moving, haunting and memorable experiences I've ever had at the movies - not only in the 2000s but in my life. Schnabel tells the true story of Jean-Dominque Bauby, former editor of Elle magazine who suffers a stroke and is left with "locked-in syndrome." Through his use of stunning, point-of-view camera work, we hear the thoughts of a perfectly-cogent Bauby and see as he sees, through one working eye. A compassionate nurse works with Bauby to create a system of associating letters of the alphabet with patterns of blinking, moving the audience from frustration to absolute wonder. Monotony goes to miracle when we learn that Bauby plans to use this system to write his memoir while he is still alive. Admittedly a bleak film, it is also one of the most profound movies about the power of the human spirit out there.
7. MILLION DOLLAR BABY, Clint Eastwood (2004). People who know me know the now-famous story of how, as the credits to this movie were rolling, my wife had to pull me out of my seat because she was embarassed by the "snotty cry" I had broken into in the theatre. A punch to the gut of the audience to mirror the punches taken by the film's protagonist, the film had Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman in Oscar-winning form, forced us to consider the messy human debate about the quality of human life anew, and put an excellent gender spin on many of the conventions of the classic boxing film genre. This was Eastwood working with the kind of material he works best with, taking one person's life and making that person's peaks and valleys serve as an example for all of us. And while Eastwood films are often dismissed as simplistic on a technical level, I think that's an unfair statement to make about this one. It's virtually flawless.
6. WALL-E, Andrew Stanton (2008). I'm not sure why more animated films didn't show up on my list, especially Pixar films, which have been excellent all decade. I had both "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille" on my short list as I ranked my films, but "Wall-E" was always intented for my top tier of movies for the decade. The fact that it's animated is almost beside the point. Who would have thought that one of the most pitch-perfect love stories of the decade (and certainly of the year of its release) would come in the form of two robots? The first third of the film is, essentially, a silent film, and Stanton injects all of the warmth and humanity of Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights" in a future Earth where humans have so trashed the environment that they cannot live there anymore. Wall-E, a clean-up robot, and his romance with EVE, a robot looking for plantlife to prove that humans can someday return to Earth, are magical. Yes, the film barely conceals a liberal, pro-environment agenda. But it does not alienate audiences politically in being so. Instead, it is a masterpiece of visual brilliance, and a movie that simply transported me and made my heart sing.
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